RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — China’s leader, Xi Jinping, will travel to Saudi Arabia on Wednesday for a flurry of meetings bringing together heads of state from across the Middle East, a region where longtime American allies are growing increasingly close to China.
Mr. Xi’s visit is aimed at deepening China’s decades-old ties with the Gulf region, which started narrowly as a bid to secure oil, and have since developed into a complex relationship involving arms sales, technology transfers and infrastructure projects.
“When countries in the Gulf think of their future, they see China as their partner,” said Gedaliah Afterman, head of the Asia Policy Program at the Abba Eban Institute for Diplomacy and International Relations at Reichman University in Israel.
The economic interests shared by the two countries are clear: China is Saudi Arabia’s largest trading partner, while Saudi Arabia is one of China’s largest suppliers of oil. Chinese companies are deeply enmeshed in the kingdom, building megaprojects, setting up 5G infrastructure and developing military drones.
The two governments have also found common cause as authoritarian states willing to overlook each other’s human rights abuses. Both bristle at the idea of outsiders interfering in their domestic affairs.
During the three-day visit, the Chinese leader will take part in Saudi-China, Gulf-China and Arab-China summits, the Saudi state news agency reported on Tuesday. More than 30 heads of states and leaders of international organizations plan to attend, the report said, adding that Saudi Arabia and China would sign a “strategic partnership.”
The trip sends a message that Beijing’s clout in the region is growing at a time when U.S. officials say that they want to make the Middle East less of a priority, focusing diplomatic and military resources on Asia and Europe.
The visit will inevitably draw comparisons to Donald J. Trump’s arrival in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, for his first trip abroad as president in 2017. Courted by Saudi officials, he was greeted by streets decorated with American flags and an enormous image of his face projected on the side of a building.
Saudi Arabia has been a close American ally for more than half a century, and the United States remains the oil-rich kingdom’s main security guarantor, selling it the bulk of its weaponry. But the Saudi rulers have long sought to strengthen other alliances to prepare for what they see as an emerging multipolar world, with China as a key superpower.
U.S.-Saudi ties, meanwhile, have been especially fractious over the past few years, hitting one low after another. On the campaign trail, President Biden called Saudi Arabia a “pariah.”
After assuming office, his administration declared a “recalibration” of the relationship and pressed the kingdom over the 2018 murder of the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi — a Saudi citizen and U.S. resident at the time — by Saudi agents in Istanbul.
That approach has caused irritation in the power corridors of the kingdom, where 37-year-old Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who is both the prime minister and de facto ruler, sees himself as an ascendant global leader and views his country as a regional powerhouse that is too important to slight.
Most recently, American and Saudi officials traded barbs over an October decision to cut oil production by OPEC Plus — an energy producers’ cartel in which Saudi Arabia plays a key role — with each side accusing the other of exploiting the move for political motivations.
“Xi clearly wants to make a statement at a moment at which the relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia is strained,” said James Dorsey, a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore.
“It’s a good moment to replant the flag, if you wish. And I think it’s a good moment for the Gulf States to say, ‘Hey, we have other options. Washington, you’re not the only ones out there.’”
In July, Mr. Biden traveled to Saudi Arabia for his own state visit, partly to repair the relationship. The trip was an understated affair, which U.S. officials say was at Mr. Biden’s request; he greeted Prince Mohammed with a fist bump.
During a summit with Arab leaders in the coastal city of Jeddah, he sought to reassure American allies that the United States was not abandoning the region.
“We will not walk away and leave a vacuum to be filled by China, Russia or Iran,” Mr. Biden said.
Just days after Mr. Biden departed, China’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia wrote a thinly veiled opinion article in a leading Saudi newspaper, Asharq al-Awsat, implying that Western powers had treated Saudi Arabia with “arrogance” and contrasting that with what he characterized as China’s respect for its Arab partners.
For Mr. Xi, the summits provide a respite from turmoil at home, where growing anger over China’s stringent Covid restrictions prompted nationwide protests considered the most serious challenge to the government in decades.
Saudi Arabia has not denounced the abuses against Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang despite condemnation by dozens of European countries and some Asian nations, including Turkey, an important Muslim state.
In turn, Chinese officials did not criticize the Saudi government for the murder of Mr. Khashoggi, accepting the official explanation that he was the victim of a rogue operation. And unlike with the U.S., there are few strings attached to business between China and Saudi Arabia.
“As a trading partner, China doesn’t have any requirements for Saudi Arabia in terms of sovereignty, values and ideology,” said Ma Xiaolin, an international relations scholar at Zhejiang International Studies University in Hangzhou. “Saudi Arabia trusts China.”
Those ties are increasingly visible on the streets of Riyadh, as Saudis start to buy Chinese cars and Chinese companies expand their presence. China also relies on the region for energy, and has expanded its maritime footprint in the Middle East, a conduit in its Belt and Road Initiative needed to reach trade partners in Europe.
Despite their economic ties to the Middle East, Chinese officials appear uninterested in taking on the type of strategic defense role that the United States has played in the region. Then there is the sticky matter of China’s trade and energy ties to Iran, Saudi Arabia’s regional rival.
It would be “fanciful” to think that Saudi Arabia could replace the United States with China today, said Mohammed Alyahya, a Saudi fellow at the Belfer Center at Harvard and a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.
Still, regional officials are inevitably going to react to China’s growing prominence and their perception of American decline, he said.
“When they see America’s strategic power waning, for political reasons or for reasons of the world views of certain U.S. politicians, that is a frustrating thing for Saudi Arabia,” Mr. Alyahya said.
“But I think those policymakers would also be foolish not to take U.S. threats of pivoting away from the region and recalibrating relations with the region at face value — and start thinking soberly about what a post-United States Middle East, or world order, looks like.”
How Saudi Arabia and its neighbors imagine that world order, and China’s place in it, will become clearer over the next few days. Officials in Washington will watch closely to see whether any of the agreements signed during the trip touch on more sensitive sectors, such as defense or nuclear power.
“Across some threshold, it becomes more difficult to work with us if they’re too deeply engaged in terms of military infrastructure and military equipment with China,” Colin Kahl, U.S. under secretary of defense for policy, told journalists during a briefing in Bahrain last month. “The more connected their military and intelligence systems get with Beijing, the more of a direct challenge that is to our forces here in the region.”
Still, he added, “because the geopolitical landscape is changing, I understand the mentality of hedging — or making sure you can cover all your bets.”
To say Gulf countries are hedging is an “incomplete picture,” said Jonathan Fulton, nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. The U.S. remains paramount to them, but China is essential, too.
“They do a lot of important stuff with both sides,” he said. “They want to continue doing that as long as they can.”
Vivian Nereim reported from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and David Pierson from Singapore. Edward Wongin Washington and Olivia Wang contributed reporting.
